Obscurity
This artwork is composed of over fifteen million mugshots of people arrested in the U.S. It obfuscated the criminal records of six mugshot websites by cloning them, blurring their pictures, and shuffling their data. A participatory feature let people judge the individuals arrested by deciding to keep or remove their records from the mugshot websites. The artwork was subject to legal threats from owners of mugshot websites and received support from victims of mugshot extortion. Obscurity explores information ethics and the emotional underpinning of unflattering reputation exposed on the Internet. Beyond reporting on mass incarceration, the social experiment, and the performative hack, the artist also designed the Internet privacy policy Right to Remove, which advocates for the legal right to remove personal information from search engines by adapting the Right To Be Forgotten for the United States.
